I first met Gail in 1982. At that time she lived in a house that overlooked
the opaline stretch of water which is the Cape Town Reservoir. It was
a house out of a Tennessee Williams play, with large southern dimensions,
blissful and at the same time ardent in that particular manner of Victorian
architecture, a house made to withstand and endure. But I recall thinking
that she did not seem a likely inhabitant of such a place. She seemed
preoccupied and a little vague but she was beautifully dressed in a way
that I – who also have a passion for clothes – could immediately
relate to. She had on a silk jacket in a yolky yellow with a moon coloured
short underneath that signed with sensuality and her skirt folded in such
a way that when she bent or walked up a staircase it expanded to reveal
a spectrum of faded Hibiscus colours. She seemed to be made of cellophane
and her long etiolated fingers were see-through.

She appeared frail but also a little wild as if she had been in some
way captured but was trying to get away. I sensed in her immediately a
slightly truant disposition. There were lots of children around who had
the vigour of young eels. One had just broken an ankle and forever after
when I met her there would be a broken limb splintering away in the background.
The main impression I carried away from that meeting was how, when surrounded
by people, she managed to retain a manner of aloofness, as if in order
to survive she had levitated a few meters above their heads. Also her
eyes which were of a peaceful blue could change into an edgy almost indigo
colour while you were looking at her. I noted in my book: ‘Her face
is like a room that has been aired after being shut up for a while.’

She seemed even then to be provocatively beyond the reach of the rough,
ill-polished lives of most people, someone purged of every commonplace
instinct, unacquainted with malice or petty gossip. She had a way of looking
at you in a very surprised way and giving a high tooting laugh. To me
she seemed like a woman who had been inspired by experiences that were
different and exciting. We were never great friends but over the years
I would meet her and hear snatches of her life. She revealed her past
as you might a pack of lyrical snapshots or small paintings in little
shorts of pure indelible impression. She always said, ‘I abandoned
me’. Years later she told me that she had started living along in
a flat when she was twelve. ‘I was expelled from school and my father
paid for me to live in a flat by myself. I shaved my eyebrows and smoked
those little coloured Sobrani cigarettes with gold tips.’

At fifteen she set out on a pilgrimage through Africa with a ‘delightful
old Swiss Count.’ which sounds like something out of the Madeline
children’s books by Ludwig Bemelmans. ‘He said he was going
up through Africa and I said “Can I come along?”. He replied:
“As long as you’re ready in three days.”’ Her
father gave her five pounds and said, ‘You can go but you do not
have my blessing.’ In Tanganyika they were thrown into jail for
two months. When they were released the immigration officer took them
to his house to bath and she vividly recalls his wife. ‘Her whole
face had been burnt off. There was nothing of it, only gaping holes. He
had found a job as far away from England as he could so she would not
suffer the indignity of being stared at.’ She also told me that
when they drove over the bridge at Tunduma there was a dog that had been
cut in half and stuck on top of a broom stick.

Her verbal images could be as potent as those she painted.
I think I sensed in her passion but at the time I thought it was a passion
she might inspire in others. She seemed like a woman who could bewitch
and drive men to acts of madness. S I write this, more than twenty years
later, I realise that I was encountering another type of passion. She
was in the throes of developing an incendiary love for painting. She was
almost entirely uneducated and had worked as a set builder and food stylist
until one day she had decided to become a painter. ‘I literally
sat at home with a rose in a little glass tumbler trying to draw it for
weeks on end.’ She says. At this time she has been looking at the
light out at Arniston on the East coast of Africa and had become traduced
by the nacreous quality of sea shells and was convinced that here was
another colour spectrum relating to the moon.

When she started talking about it her eyes changed blues at such an alarming
rate she might have been connected to an unreliable electricity supply.
Although I had come to interview her about sometime entirely different
we returned to the subject over and over again, not in an egocentric way,
but in the manner of someone who has a disease that will kill them in
a few months cannot avoid the subject. I see her standing in the great
hallway of that house with its flagstones and southern sun falling in
bars across the floor. She is holding something up to the light and pointing
and explaining and I am simply writing in my book “probably bats”.

She told me at that first meeting that she was off to the Royal College
of Art and indeed showed me a weighty number of different coloured pearly
clays that she intended taking with her and I imagined her in the Gothic
gleam of London clutching these desert sands from Africa. She had applied
to the Royal College of Art to do a post graduate course. At first they
laughed at her but she went to see them and said, ‘Look you must
understand I am passionate about this thing.’ It is to their credit
that they took her seriously. Some years before she had started working
with resins and fibreglass which if lit in a certain way can pick up prismatic
qualities but only if used in a sculptural form.
‘I wanted to paint with them so when I was at the Royal College
of Art in London I went to the Imperial College of Science, Technology
and Medicine and showed them these pearly surfaces and said, “How
do I go about getting this? They said I should go back to my studio and
put a little mirror on the window sill which would then catch a light
beam and reflect it onto a black surface. It is the ancient method of
reflecting light”.

Although Gail had achieved a fundamental prism, she needed help to take
it further. The Imperial College put her in touch with a scientist at
General Electric, a man called Dr Cyril Hilsum who had worked on the invention
of the hologram. ‘He was in his seventies, brilliant and wonderful,
and when he interviewed me he was wearing feathers. He said, “Come
with me.” We got into his car and he had a set of buttons and he
just went pum pum pum and programmed the car. We drove all the way to
the General Electric factory and he didn’t touch the steering wheel
or the brakes.’ This was back in 1982 and he had a fully computerised
car.

It was a meeting that would radically change her life and dynamically
forge a route along a road she had already begun to tramp. In the end
it would lead her to the substance that lies dearest to her heart and
which had been whirling round her imagination for a decade but –
without a formal scientific training – kept slipping from her grasp
like soap bubbles underfoot . Her quarry was liquid crystals a substance
that has been around since the middle of the 19th century. There are numerous
liquid crystalline materials. They fall into three main categories smetic
(soap like, nematic (as in data displays and watches) and cholestric which
produces colours that depend on temperature. She received a grant to work
with the magical cholestric crystals and for ten years she co-operated
with what she refers to with some reverence as ‘the scientists’.
I had no idea what I was doing, I just made happy accident after happy
accident. I would send them the sample and they would send it back to
me explaining the scientific process.’

Slowly her acquaintance with the fugitive alchemy of ‘liquid crystals’
with its fleeting light-sensitive iridescence and its living response
came to dominate her life. She began to understand more of its qualities
and even anticipate its responses. She understood when to tease or tame,
when to dominate or give rein. It was this powerful and magical relationship.
It was liquid crystal that chartered her ups and downs, countered the
baleful fragility of daily life and sometimes brought glory to her heart.
I did not know much about her painting. She was hardly ever seen at fashionable
art functions. She seemed to disappear for years and years. Once I caught
sight of her crossing the road, stepping out tentatively like a water
bird and wearing lantern earrings that glittered with tiny burnished stones
and a long scarf of oriental gauze that seemed soaked in mysterious pigments.
She was a little like a character out of Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Alexandria
Quartet’, mysterious and enticing, but someone who guarded her secrets
like a cat. Whenever I saw her, she was in some stage of pregnancy. With
her it seemed to be an almost chronic condition, and she carried it as
you might a small deformity, such as a birthmark.

The big paradox with Gail always seemed that although there had been
a signpost in her heart for most of her like with the world ‘artist’
written on it, she went on producing children. In all she had eight (one
died). How did she exist as a mother and an artist? ‘The one drove
the other. The more children I had – particularly when I was pregnant
– the more obsessed I became by not being gobbled up by every body
and losing my own individuality.’

When she was mentioned in the intimate environs of Cape Town it was often
in relation to the birth of a new child. Less was known about her art
because she never sought publicity, and Cape Town in any case, always
had that provincial way of disregarding real talent. I do not think that
she was adverse to publicity in the pretentious manner of some artists.
She was simply puzzled by it and a journalist turning up at her door might
find a child with a broken arm, and Gail’s complete inability to
understand the first thing about marketing herself. Visitors would find
her eyes resting on them intently. She was positioning them within her
powerful imagination from where she could set about decoding them.

If she ever seemed self obsessed or distracted it was because of her
art. She might be in the middle of doing a picture or just beginning one.
Her necessity, which sometimes seemed like an indulgence, as she sifted
through diets and therapies – and sometimes her body could let her
down badly – was to keep strong, because she knew she must keep
her vitality to continue painting. If she was to succeed as an artist,
she needed to be solicitous of her needs and conserve her energy against
marauding domesticity. ‘Do not for a minute thing that she is vague
or disorganised,’ says a close friend, ‘she is extraordinary,
managing a large family, always fresh, generous and available for friends.
If she says she is going to be somewhere at a certain time she will. She
is highly organised and she has always earned her own money.’

The great thing about acquaintanceships is that they need not be renewed.
They exist unchanged through the years, so when I dropped in on her house
in the Hemel en Aarde (Heaven and Earth) valley outside Hermanus on the
South East Coast of South Africa, it was as if the years between had vanished,
and here she was with a new batch of children, a new husband, a new house
which she seemed to have built herself stone for stone. It was a warm
summer day and shields of light played against the trees, and we swam
naked in the dam at the bottom of her garden. She had just been to some
desert or other, and held a new accumulation of mineral rocks in her hand,
gazing at them with awe. For a while she looked at me vacantly and often
gave a high laugh, but once again her eyes had taken on that dangerous
blue. A few weeks later I realised that she had been so fixated by my
white legs and red sandals that she had done a painting of them.

I went down to see the painting before it was sent to the client in Germany,
and was interested to notice that above my red shoes some great hawk-like
creature was eating into my flesh. Was it an artistic prerogative, I wondered,
to gain purchase of another’s soul by means of a pair of red shoes.
(See Plate 10.)

It might have been a circuitous route, and indeed the liquid crystal
medium seemed a crafty ally when it came to confronting the variety of
needs accumulated within the human psyche, or even the chaos of nature,
but she had managed to scythe into my personal landscape with an almost
medical precision and this, like everything in her life, seemed a bit
magical.

If my sketch of her is blurry then it is because writers, too, need the
technical advantage of impressionism. I do not know the names of her husbands
or her children or even how old she is. She has always seemed like someone
who has sprung both from the mythical and natural worlds, silky-winged
and ethereal, but with a frenzied vigour that makes her a grand painter.

by Lin Sampson

Liquid Crystal,
And the Magic time of Alchemy

As an artist Gail Catlin was always drawn to the kind of experiment and
innovation which would crystallise her impressions of nature with greater
fidelity, and pin down the most elusive of nuances, the most intangible
subtleties. As a lover of landscapes one of her besetting preoccupations
had always been light, and in 1982, she spent a few months at a studio
in Arniston, a small fisherman’s village on the Cape coast, where
she observed the sea, the rise and fall of the tides, and the shifting
atmospheric effects playing over the ocean. It seemed to her that the
traditional media of oil paint, acrylics and watercolour could no longer
do justice to her vision. As she worked on nocturnes and crepuscules,
her dissatisfaction augmented, and on her strolls along the beach where
she examined the silvery, nacreous interior of shells like mother-of-pearl,
she realised that it was precisely this sheeny, reflective quality that
she wished to emulate. It also occurred to her that there might be another
colour spectrum beside the one that we are accustomed to, a colour spectrum
related to the moon rather than the sun, and that if she could discover
this, and encapsulate it in paint, it would endow her work with far greater
veracity, vigour and strength.

It was at this turning point in her career, that Gail received news that
she had been accepted as an M.A. student at the Royal College of Art in
London. As Gail had never completed her schooling, and possessed no academic
credentials whatsoever, she had filed her application with scant hope
of acceptance. This unforeseen opportunity, which descended like a bolt
from the blue, filled her with joy and trepidation. Would she be equal
to the task? On arrival in London, her fears were soon allayed, and the
year of study more than fulfilled her every hope: it proved catalytic,
completely transforming both her life and her art. Gail speaks with effusive
nostalgic affection of her Royal College days, and continually dwells
on the debt of gratitude she owes to the institution, and, more particularly
to Professor Peter de Francia and Doctor John Golding, the distinguished
art historian, who cavalierly waived the rules, and admitted Gail purely
on the strength of their admiration for the body of work she had submitted
to them.

The Royal College provided a permissive and intellectually invigorating
environment. Gail’s tutors were not desiccated, blinkered pedagogues:
on the contrary they proved astonishingly open-minded, flexible and receptive.
As many of them were practising artists themselves, there was an immediate
spark of mutual affinity, understanding and warmth. Despite her ringing
laughter, twinkling eyes and infectious sense of mischief and fun, Gail
is a shy, self-deprecatory personality, and at first she was diffident
about revealing her ambitions, as they seemed to her so utterly unorthodox,
she feared the Royal college would dismiss her as a deluded misfit, a
‘loopy, wacky lady’ to use her own words. However when she
confided her plans to discover the lunar colour spectrum, and thus supplement
her palette with a new range of colours which would approximate more closely
to the fading, light effects she observed after sunset and during stormy
weather, the College not only understood, it also provided unstinting
moral and practical support. Her teachers never imposed alien artistic
notions upon her. They were not prescriptive, instead they fostered what
was innate within her, actively encouraged her to experiment and innovate,
and pulled every string they could in order to open doors for her, and
provide the entrée into both the artistic and scientific worlds.

Her tutors directed her for the Imperial College of Science, Technology
and Medicine. There she outlined her goals to the experts, explaining
that what she wanted to capture in paint was something akin to the fluid,
mobile quality of he dark, striated colours you glimpse in the shallow
pools of water that gather on tarmac roads after the rain, and which continually
waver and alternate in tit, fluctuating from dark to light, from glossy
to matt. The scientists advised Gail to use liquid crystal on a black
surface, and this was her first introduction to the scientific invention
that would later become her principle medium, and dominate her life. As
the technological applications of liquid crystal have only been discovered
over the past twenty years, and as it became the vehicle which brought
Gail’s art to mature fruition, and intensified its expressive power,
it is essential that the reader know precisely what it is.

The actual formula for creating liquid crystal remains a closely guarded
industrial secret. However the substance was originally derived from the
cholesterol in sheep’s brains. Scientists were able to chemically
simulate it and apply it to space research. It is a highly sensitive material.
Physically it is a white liquid, with the consistency of thick custard,
and it only bears a resemblance to crystal as we know it, after it has
been applied and allowed to set for approximately twenty-four hours, after
which it becomes rock-hard and translucent. In order to protect it, the
solidified liquid crystal is always coated in a scientifically formulated
resin.

Liquid crystal refracts light, and when it is used to optimum effect,
it functions life a perfectly cut and faceted diamond, and picks up the
light, breaks it down into the various colours of the spectrum and reflects
them with unrivalled brilliance and clarity. Put simply, it functions
exactly like a prism, except that it does not diminish either the intensity
of the colour, nor the pristine radiance of the light.

The story of Gail’s involvement with liquid crystal is a long and
complex saga charged with all the drama and reversals of fortune the term
implies. When she first started working with the material, Gail could
only dimly intuit the vast range of artistic possibilities it might open
for her, and it was only after six years of constant, but passionately
absorbing experiment, that she was able to control the medium and deploy
it in a calculated way t obtain certain specific, pre-planned results.
However, although the artist attained a far more intimate familiarity
with liquid crystal, and grasped many of its properties and behavioural
patterns, complete understanding eluded her, and her process of discovery
remains an ongoing odyssey, as the medium continually reveals new characteristics
that extend its artistic scope, and thus perpetually amplify the range
of Gail’s creative expression. The ardour with which Gail reminisces
about this interminable trial-period of research and assay, reveals that
she did not find it in the least dry, clinical or sterile. Gail throws
herself heart and soul into every endeavour, and for her the challenge
assumed the romantic excitement of an adventure or quest. Gail is the
kind of all or nothing individual who thrives on gamble and risk, and
her commitment to this fraught and problematic enterprise was absolute
and unremitting.

Following the leads provided by the Imperial College scientists, Gail
experimented, and although she succeeded in obtaining a prismatic effect,
and a strange, dusky light that she likes to think of as ‘black’,
the resultant colour range possessed a darkling, penumbral quality, that
rendered it far too dim and obscure to serve as a basis for her representation
of African landscape and life, for the dark, inky colours bore no resemblance
to the pale, bleached-out tones produced by the fierce, burning, sub-Saharan
sun. In order to paint again, Gail had somehow to find a way out of this
chromatic impasse.

When she described her predicament, the Imperial College referred her
to Doctor Cyril Hilsum, the head scientist at General Electric, a charismatic
figure of enormous charm, warmth and generosity, and a polymath and indefatigable
innovator, who had formed part of the corps d’ elite who invented
the hologram. When Gail met him, he was engaged in research directed at
finding practical applications for liquid crystal, and he unhesitatingly
imparted his knowledge of the substance to Gail, provided prodigal encouragement
and arranged sponsorship to finance her attempts to develop liquid crystal
in to a viable resource for artistic creation. Both he and the College
were committed to fostering a fruitful, symbiotic interplay between art
and science. To this end, Doctor Hilsum introduced Gail to other scientists
who were exploring the potential of liquid crystal in a whole variety
of different ways, by applying it to digital watches and contraception;
exploiting it to detect wind tunnels in astronautic exploration; and utilising
it as an instrument of medical diagnosis. Gail was enthusiastically welcomed
into this inner sanctum of recondite erudition, and soon consolidated
warm friendships with these technocrats who were to become her colleagues
and collaborators. Her rapport with Doctor Hilsum was particularly developed,
as his daunting intellectual accomplishments went hand in hand with a
streak of madcap eccentricity and prankishness which immediately dissolved
formality and pretension, and endeared him to Gil who admired his scholarly
eminence and relished his whimsical tomfoolery.

At the time Gail was conducting her researched, liquid crystal was still
in its infancy, and the whole field was largely terra incognita. Only
a handful of international scientists were engaged in the scientific definition
of the substance. Its properties had not been categorised and little had
been codified. Doctor Hilsum acted as a mentor to Gail, and the two worked
closely together as a team, with Doctor Hilsum cast in the role of analyst
and evaluator, and Gail acting as experimenter. Doctor Hilsum supplied
Gail with liquid crystal, and sent her specimens on all the latest by-products
of the medium, so as to keep her abreast of current developments. She
in turn, continually submitted samples of the surfaces she was creating
in liquid crystal, so that Doctor Hilsum could analyse the results, and
discover how Gail had obtained that particular surface, colour, texture
or sheen. Gail had embarked on a voyage in the dark, and she relied entirely
on Doctor Hilsum to dispel the mysteries and enigmas that beset her. Whenever
she created a new effect, she had no inkling how on earth she had produced
it. Through microscopic, scrutiny, Doctor Hilsum was able to furnish a
scientific explanation for its origin, devise formulae, and thereby evolve
a rudimentary methodology to systemise Gail’s investigations.

Gail’s studies at the Royal College proceeded at the same time
as her involvement with liquid crystal. This was not an easy period for
the artist who was not a free agent. With a husband and four children
back home in South Africa, she was naturally rent by divided loyalties,
so her studies – with the consent of the Royal College – were
punctuated by frequent sojourns in the country of her birth, where she
would produce a new body of work, and return to the College in order to
evaluate it with her tutors. At this stage there was a complete hiatus
between Gail’s exploratory research into liquid crystal, and the
kind of avant-gardist art she was producing for submission to the Royal
College. The two belonged to separate areas. Gail’s student art
works never exploited the resources of liquid crystal, as she had not
yet made sufficient advance in this medium to produce work which would
meet stringent academic criteria. The liquid crystal paintings still remained
tentative and inchoate, so what she executed for the Royal College were
sculptural wall pieces and paintings in relief, executed in a wide variety
of different media such as clay, natural dyes, pigments, resin, her own
hand-made paper and thick films of cellophane which she treated in order
to enliven them with silvery sheens and subtle colours. These extraordinary
pale, frail and delicate creations are illustrated on Plates 24, 25, 26
and 27. although the College works are executed in other media, both they
and the later liquid crystal paintings display a distinct air de familie.
Both clearly reveal the artist’s obsession with superimposition,
layering, encrustation and the creation of misty, semi-opaque, silvery
and opalescent hues that act as veils, concealing and revealing as they
gleam and glitter in response to the light. The goal of these early works,
which appear so gossamery, as to verge on the immaterial, was to create
a fragile, filamentary surface so sensitive that every shift in the level
of light would generate change in their colour, sheen and degree of opacity.
They thus clearly anticipate the vital, ‘living’ surfaces
that, as we shall see, Gail finally managed to create later in her liquid
crystal paintings. Metastasis – the ability of the art work to escape
fixity, and constantly transform itself like a kaleidoscope – is
Gail’s personal contribution to art, and it explains why her tutors
often playfully described her, not as a painter, but as an alchemist devising
arcane in the domain of magic and wizardry.

When she had completed her year of study at the Royal College, Gail returned
to South Africa where she spent five further years experimenting with
liquid crystal, constantly sending the results back to Doctor Hilsum.
Although all sorts of happy accidents occurred, Gail battled to gain control
of the medium and harness its full potential. However, struggle as she
did, one insuperable obstacle continued to dog her, and that was her inability
to wrest anything other than the same range of dark, nocturnal colours
from the medium. Although Gail knew that liquid crystal possessed inexhaustible
possibilities, she could not access them. The substance obstinately refused
to yield the kind of palette she needed in order to evoke her chosen terrain,
the sun-baked African plain. Despite this infuriatingly intractable deadlock,
Gail never succumbed to discouragement. On the contrary, she had become
so compulsively engrossed in her experiments, that he almost lost sight
of the goals they were intended to serve. When the South African artist,
Cecil Skotness, visited her, and told her that she was wasting her time,
and that the moment had finally dawned when she must cease dissipating
her energies on futile experiments, and start producing paintings again
in oil on canvas, her reply was ‘Never! I will pursue my researches
until I have solved my problems, and if I don’t, and never produce
another painting for the rest of my life, I don’t care!’ This
obdurate retort provides some insight into the passionate, obsessional
nature of Gail’s temperament. Her contempt for compromise, and her
tendency to extremity, her love of living on the edge.

Fortunately fluke provided a way out of the dead end. In 1985 Gail spent
some time in Amsterdam copying old master drawings at the Rijks in the
tradition of students perfecting their draftmanship. Before she departed
Holland, Gail also bought a fresh supply of liquid crystal. The providential
breakthrough occurred immediately on her return to South Africa. Gail
was so excited at the prospect of resuming her experiments, that, in a
serendipitous excess of zeal, instead of patiently preparing the black
grounds she had employed in the past, Gail impatiently applied the liquid
crystal to one of her Dutch drawings on white paper. Hitherto liquid crystal
had never worked on a white surface, but on this occasion, it did. The
entire drawing sprang into vibrant life, glowing with the soft, luminescent
colours Gail had sought in vain for so long. However the quest was not
yet over. Although Gail exulted in the fact that she had at last provided
definitive proof that liquid crystal was capable of producing any colour,
she still found herself in a quandary, for she possessed no idea whatsoever
how she had triumphantly resolved her dilemma. As usual she was working
as if blindfolded, and it was only after she sent the drawing to Doctor
Hilsum that she received a rational explanation for what she had achieved.
Analysis revealed that, as the paper had a slight ripple to it, the liquid
rested on it at a diagonal tilt. This meant that the individual crystals
were all aligned at oblique slants, instead of the same plane, which had
always been the case before. The face that each crystal, instead of presenting
a smooth, uniform, planar surface to the light as formerly, was placed
at a slightly different inclination, greatly enhanced the crystal’s
light refractive quality.

Doctor Hilsum made two discoveries which had crucial repercussions for
Gail. Firstly, the brilliance with which the liquid crystal reflects the
light, and refracts it into the chromatic elements that compose the spectrum,
depends on how the liquid crystal is lain down upon the surface, and more
especially the angles at which the various crystals are aligned relative
to the light source. These two factors determine its response to the light,
and dictate both the intensity of its luminosity, and the number of different
directions in which it reflects the light. The basic principle is, that
the more you angle your crystals, the more you enhance their ability to
reflect the light in different directions. This, in turn, produces a greater
degree of optical shimmer and chromatic contrast. As each crystal is a
miniature prism, by angling them at different rakes, you set up a chromatic
interplay of reflected beams of colour which cross each other’s
path, interact, and combine to produce enormously complex variegations
of hue.

The second significant finding was that the flat black surfaces upon
which Gail had worked hitherto, made the crystal reflect intense, but
subfusc, vespertine shades. The new white ground, by contrast, reflected
softer, lighter colours. This by using white grounds in conjunction with
black grounds, Gail was enabled to create any colour she desired. This
liberation of Gail’s palette was the climactic excelsior that crowned
six years of incessant endeavour, and to Gail it possessed all the ecstatic
thrill of a miracle.

Experiment proceeded apace. An enormous amount of research – extending
over this six year period was involved – not only in discovering
how to release the full spectrum of colour, and discharge its full brilliance
and intensity, but also in order to ensure that the resultant work of
art would be stable and lasting. The six year period of experiment was
just that, a period of experiment , and not a time of artistic production,
for the artist was compelled to discard almost everything she created,
as the work was still technically imperfect, and the problems posed by
the medium seemingly irresoluble.

When Gail had eventually attained sufficient mastery to create a small
nucleus of liquid crystal paintings that satisfied her rigorous critical
standards, she contracted her sponsors who invited her to hold an exhibition.
The exhibition ‘Vapour Drawings’ was held at the Linda Goodman
Gallery in Johannesburg in 1989, where it elicited critical commendation,
and many purchases both local and international, although neither viewers
nor critics were familiar with liquid crystals and its intricacies, as
Gail is temperamentally averse to the kind of networking and self-publicity
that has become such and unfortunate necessity in today’s art world.
‘Vapour Drawings’ was Gail’s last solo show. The exigencies
of earning a living to provide for herself and her seven children, constrained
her to sell her work as she produced it. It was only through the munificence
of one of Gail’s dealers, Louis Schachat, that Gail was freed to
create the array of new paintings you see at this exhibition. Louis Schachat
not only purchased Gail’s work, in addition he paid her a generous
retainer, relieving her from financial pressures, and granting her the
time and freedom to produce this volume of work. Gail urged me to seize
this opportunity to thank Louis from the bottom of her heart. Over the
past few years, Gail’s work has begun to excite critical interest
and command increasingly high prices. She is currently regarded as one
of South Africa’s major artists. The very fact that this exhibition
is being held at South African House, serves as an indication that her
country has recognised her contribution, and acknowledged her stature
as an artist. To Gail, it seems like a kind of apotheosis.

All Gail’s painting on the exhibition represent a marriage of modern
technology in the form of liquid crystal, with traditional oil paints,
water-colours and glazes. Virtually every work is partly executed in liquid
crystal which is unique to Gail who – to our knowledge – is
the first and only artist in the entire world to employ it.

Liquid crystal has enabled Gail to create paintings that are completely
sui generis, as the medium is unique, and achieves effects that have never
been realised before with quite such dazzling impact. Liquid crystal’s
basic property is its extreme volatility, and keen responsiveness to even
minimal changes in the intensity of both temperature and illumination
which immediately excite dramatic colour shifts in the substance. This
enables Gail to create a live surface that constantly transforms itself
in endless permutations. Her paintings change ceaselessly, not only in
response to the stimuli of different degrees of light and of temperature,
but also in response to the viewer’s distance from the painting,
and the angle o vision from which he regards it. As you move before the
painting, so the effects of colour, light, reflection and sheen modulate
continually.

Liquid crystal is an elusive medium that is both there and not there,
both present and absent. When there is little light and little warmth,
the liquid crystal becomes inert, and the painting stands on its own as
a completely satisfactory aesthetic statement. At such times it presents
and appearance similar to a conventional oil painting. However when the
light and heat intensify, they activate the liquid crystal, and trigger
off molecular change. This in turn, gives rise to luminary effects, so
that the entire surface incandesces, as it breaks down and reflects the
light. As liquid crystal continually responds to variations in temperature
and light – factors which by their very nature change all the time
– there is no halting this process. Nothing can arrest the fluctuations,
nor fix the image which is compelled by chemical laws to transfigure itself
without surcease. Thus the photographic reproductions contained within
this book, cannot do justice to the work, for they suspend the chromatic
and luminary events which perpetually enact themselves upon the picture
surface.

To cite an example, let us examine Plate 14. As heat and light determine
the colour of the owl’s plumage, this is a variable, not a constant.
In the photographic reproduction the range of colours consists of very
delicate, subtle and nuanced blues which vary in intensity from deep,
shades to lighter paler tones. However the colour range changes all the
time, and at moments the repertoire of blues will yield to a scale of
greens or yellows.

Plate 14 is a fairly tonal, monochromatic study, but Plates 8 and Plate
6 present us with a far more rich and diverse range of colours which,
too, fluctuate continually.
To produce such vibrant contrasts of colour, Gail may, for example, employ
five different types of liquid crystals. Each of the five responds differently
to temperature. The calorific starting point at which each of the five
different liquid crystals types is activated - and thus enabled to trigger
off colour change - differs from between eighteen degrees to thirty two
degrees. Because they operate prismatically, all the crystals produce
an identical colour range, but as different temperatures provide the catalyst
that makes them respond to light with chromatic shifts, each of the five
different liquid crystal types will produce different colours at the same
temperature, so that, at any given moment in time, the crystals can produce
the entire colour spectrum. Thus while one crystal will produce red at
18 degrees, another will produce blue, and another, green, and so on.

The process of laying down the different crystals necessitates complex
and largely intuitive calculation. Gail not only has to mentally gauge
how all these different nuances of colour are going to complement each
other, she also has to take into account how the liquid crystal palette
will interact harmoniously with the oil paints and water colours she also
applies. Thus every painting is a matter of trial and error, and it is
only produced after days of exhaustive experiment directed at adjusting
and reconciling the various colours into a felicitous accord.

The liquid crystal which has established itself as the true basis of
Gail's art, differs so dramatically from conventional media, it imposes
highly idiosyncratic working methods. The actual physical process of painting
is always preceded by the creation of a draft drawing which has to achieve
complete accuracy, as it serves as Gail's blueprint when she commences
executing the final work in liquid crystal. Everything has to be minutiously
planned right down to the last detail, because, liquid crystal is akin
to water-colour inasmuch as every mark is ineradicable, and every mistake
irreversible. You cannot paint out passages that prompt dissatisfaction
as you can when working with oils, as once the crystal has been laid down
on the picture surface it cannot be shifted or erased.

Having completed the draft, Gail then tackles the picture surface. Usually
she uses perspex as her base, although occasionally she employs paper,
board or canvas. Because her liquid crystal painting is an ongoing creative
process of discovery, there is no set formula. The painting is always
improvised on an ad hoc basis, and it is the mood of the painting, that
determines the artist's technique. Often Gail's working methods are spontaneous
and random, designed to elicit the felicitous accident, the unforeseen
result, the gifts of hazard and chance, but experiment always goes hand
in hand with an element of control, as Gail has slowly become so familiar
with the substance, that she can predict exactly how it will react, particularly
when she relies on the usual methods she has evolved over time. Although
the mode of application differs from painting to painting, there is a
consistency of approach.
The liquid crystal is only used in selective areas of the painting, and
never covers the entirety of the surface. In Plate 14, Gail applied the
liquid crystal in two areas alone, the figurative sections of the painting
depicting the owl and the two massive piled-up rocks. Gail lays the liquid
crystal down with a brush on the transparent perspex picture surface.
She then allows it to dry, harden and achieve translucency. Even when
it has set, liquid crystal remains such an extraordinarily fragile and
hypersensitive material that it can be ruined by contact with dust, chemicals
and other paints, so Gail has to seal it by coating it in a layer of scientifically
formulated resin.

Then comes what Gail terms 'the magic time of alchemy' when the artist
starts her mark-making, applying traditional oil paints to both the front
of the picture, i.e. the resin-coated liquid crystal surface, and the
back of the picture where she works directly on the perspex. Thus the
oil paints and pigments lie both behind and above the perspex, liquid
crystal and resin. When she has finished the process of mark-making in
oil paint or water-colour or both, she applies a final ground of colour
behind the perspex at the back of the painting. She then brings the picture
surface to completion, by applying anything from six to thirty layers
of glazes.

In the case of Plate 14, Gail applied the deep midnight blue oil paint
directly to the resin surface with her fingers, making a whole series
of downward movements of the hand to create the illusion of the wing's
vigorous, whirring agitation. The magical jewel-like gleam that vivifies
the blues, and makes them lambent is an effect produced by the liquid
crystal above the oil paint. The darker the colour of paint applied behind
the perspex, the greater the intensity of brilliance and iridescence the
liquid crystal imparts to the colours that lie behind it, and conversely
the lighter the colour applied behind the perspex, the less intense is
the effect of the layer of oil paint and glazes, and the dimmer the effulgent
effect.

The rocks are produced by an entirely different technique which creates
and effect of sculpture in low relief. Onto her liquid crystal, Gail applies
a layer of scientifically formulated resin which she then combines with
the local clay found on the banks of the lake beside which she now lives.
She then employs two methods. She either creates a solid object about
25mm thick or she builds the object up, using layer upon layer of clay
and resin. Each type is covered in sparse painterly marks which only cover
a fraction of its surface. Because each layer bears traces of paint an
illusion of profound depth results. The eye travels through the successive
layers absorbing the forms which are superimposed upon each other. A in
Plate 14, it is the liquid crystal behind all the layered resin and paint
that make the rock formation glimmer like very low level neon. The naked,
uncovered, solidified rock crystal only appears through the paint at intervals,
but because it creates a silvery reflective surface like that of a mirror,
it suggests infinite depth.

Gail applies her oils in a wide variety of ways to create different effects.
Plate 14 is similar to Plate 6, inasmuch as the liquid crystal is only
used behind the anatomical forms which delineate the bird of prey and
the woman, and not in the red ground where the luminous effect is created
purely by dense layers of red tinctured glazes. Here the oil paint has
been applied in a completely antithetical, seemingly off-the-cuff, aleatory
way, although the effect is meticulously concerted. It is a matter of
seemingly random structure which is in reality, carefully controlled by
the artist. The surface of the anatomies is spattered with irregular blobs,
streaks, daubs, drips, spills and trails of paint to create a scumbled
effect in which one colour shows through another. All this is distinct,
sharply defined and seen in crisp focus, but Gail, who adores contrasts
of texture and transparency, then overlays sections of this richly patterned
surface with semi-opaque, opalescent, green, violet and red glazes to
create an effect like mist, fog or haze which either blurs the forms behind
them, or completely occludes them. At intervals the pure liquid crystal
appears in its care state through tiny interstices in the paint, creating
a dazzling white or silvery sheen reminiscent of mirror, silver foil or
mica.

Gail’s painting are paradoxical. They always honour the modernist
imperative that the artist renounce illusionism, and compel the canvas
to disclose its true nature as a flat two-dimensional surface, at the
same time as they produce this sense of infinite depth. The boundless
expanses Gail creates, are seen to superb advantage in what I call her
‘cosmic landscapes’ (see Plates 12, 13 and 20) where the sprinkle
of stars in the night sky appears to be light years away from us in distance.
Gail uses many devices to simulate fathomless receding space. The first
is purely traditional, and consists of the multiple layers of delicately
tinted glazes she applies one on top of the other. Further legerdemain
occurs through Gail’s reliance on colour theory to create the impression
that the transparent picture surface forms the doorway to an endless spatial
continuum. Her strategy is to juxtapose colours that activate each other.
By aligning colours according to scientific principles, Gail achieves
a dynamic effect. One colour will make its neighbour appear to recede,
while another will make it appear to project, so this interplay creates
a pulsating surface in which the colours are animated, and continually
appear to protrude in front of the adjacent colour or to sink back into
depth behind it. A perfect example of this occurs in Plates 16, 17 and
18, which reproduce a triptych devoted to wild dogs. Here the earth that
supports them is so drastically tilted upwards that it appears like a
plinth. This gravely base is executed in warm, organic colours that propel
themselves forward toward the picture plane, while the blue sky behind
the beasts is cold, and recedes into depth. The dogs thus assume an emphatic,
three-dimensional presence like sculpture, and the fact that they cast
dark, anti-naturalistic shadows in the sky, heightens this impression
of solidity, volume and illimitable expansiveness.

The illusion of depth is also enhanced by the solid forms that Gail embeds
in the resin, which erupt the picture’s surface. These appear suspended
within it, and create the suggestion that space occurs behind them. The
best illusion of this is the cosmic painting reproduced in Plate 12 where
the painted resin and clay is fashioned into coloured rocks, like asteroids
or satellites, that appear to float in orbit above the earth.

It seems to me that Gail’s pioneering technological innovation
in adapting liquid crystal to artistic creation corresponds to an internal
necessity. She addresses one theme and one theme alone, although it assumes
a multiplicity of forms, and that theme is nature, and more specifically
the African landscape, its flora, fauna, cloud formations, light and diurnal
rhythms of noon, sunset and sunrise. In order to achieve total immersion
in nature, Gail lives in an isolated area in the South Eastern part of
the Cape Province of South Africa, populated with abundant wild life in
the form of rodents, snakes, insects, bushbuck, rooikatte (African feral
cats) and birds of all kinds. Every year she journeys deep into the hinterland,
and spends long sojourns in isolation in the bush. The bulk of the later
work reproduced in this book was executed in the Karoo, a depopulated
African semi-desert. During her rambles she scrutinises the landscape
– grasses, blossoms, foliage, trees, leaves, wild animals –
and the skyscape – clouds, lightning, dust storms and the moon and
stars. She is keenly sensitive to the fact that nature is never static,
rather it is process, metamorphosis and change. Nature is flux, and liquid
crystal is the most dramatic and effective medium with which to express
this, because it continually changes of its own accord, and eliminates
any element of fixity. Like nature and the cosmos they depict, Gail’s
paintings revolve around immemorial cycles and rhythms. The hour of the
day, the season of the year, determine how her liquid crystal paintings
respond to the light, in just the same way as the events recorded in her
animal paintings and landscapes are determined by the earth’s journey
around the sun. There is thus a perfect equation between the artist’s
themes and the medium she has perfected in order to give them expression.

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